Throughout his career, Smalley maintained a strong commitment to teaching and public service. For example, he still taught undergraduate chemistry in the fall of 1996 when the Nobel Prize was announced.
“One key thing I learned from Rick that I try to teach my students is that we are here doing science because the taxpayers have given us a license to do that,” Heath said. “We need to do great science that can change the world we live in, and we need to be sure that we can always explain to the average nonscientist on the street why their investment is worthwhile.”

Even while battling cancer, Smalley maintained a hectic work and travel schedule and an intense focus on his research. As director of the Carbon Nanotechnology Laboratory, he continued to develop foundational technologies for carbon nanotube production and processing.

One of Smalley’s most ambitious programs, the Armchair Quantum Wire project, began in April with $11 million funding from NASA. He described the quantum wire during his acceptance of the Distinguished Alumni Award from Hope College in May, calling it “a continuous cable of buckytubes that we expect will conduct electricity 10 times better than copper yet have only one-sixth the weight, a zero coefficient of thermal expansion, and a tensile strength greater than steel. If we succeed, we’ll be able to rewire the world, replacing aluminum and copper in virtually every application and permitting a vast increase in the capacity of the nation’s electrical grid.”

Smalley was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science, the American Physical Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

He was the recipient of countless honors, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from Small Times magazine (2003), the Glenn T. Seaborg Medal from UCLA (2002), the American Carbon Society Medal (1997), the Franklin Medal from the Committee on Science and the Arts of the Franklin Institute (1996), Hewlett-Packard Europhysics Prize from the European Physical Society (1994), the Welch Award in Chemistry from the Robert A. Welch Foundation (1992), Ernest O. Lawrence Memorial Award from the U.S. Department of Energy (1992), and the Irving Langmuir Prize in Chemical Physics from the American Physical Society (1991).

While the Nobel Prize won him worldwide recognition, the award carried a special significance for members of the Rice community because it resulted directly from work carried out on the campus. “When Rick and Bob won the Nobel Prize, it broke a boundary and forever changed the way people think about Rice,” said James Crownover, chair of the Rice Board of Trustees. “With that achievement, they showed that with imagination, inspiration, and commitment, there are no boundaries to what Rice and its people can accomplish.”

From the moment of their discovery, buckyballs attracted scientific attention worldwide. Carbon, at the time, was believed to be one of the most stable of all elements, with only two primary forms: graphite and diamond. The discovery of a third form was astounding to many, and it presaged the dawning of a new era in the physical sciences in which scientists could exert an unprecedented level of control over materials.
Shaped like soccer balls and no wider than a strand of DNA, buckyballs are molecules of pure carbon. Each contains 60 carbon atoms arranged in a hollow sphere. The atomic arrangement of the carbon atoms resembles two conjoined geodesic domes, and Smalley coined the name “buckminsterfullerene” in honor of famed architect and geodesic dome inventor Buckminster Fuller.

Smalley was fond of pointing out that the machinery of life itself, at the most basic level of DNA and protein encoding, draws its power from controlling matter with atomic precision. He coined the term “wet” nanotechnology to apply to the biological systems that operate at the nanoscale and “dry” nanotechnology to describe the physical/chemical systems that nanotechnologists were developing. At one point in the early years following the discovery of buckyballs, he said that biology was the only working nanotechnology. His vision was to work at the interface between these wet and dry systems to bring the range of systems that could be generated in the dry realm to bear on the wet world of biology and to create entirely new systems.

“Rick could focus so completely on his goals, and he could inspire his students and his colleagues to a similar focus,” said Kathleen Matthews, dean of the Wiess School of Natural Sciences and the Stewart Memorial Professor of Biochemistry. “He had the ability to persuade others with a rare intensity of thought and spirit. He brought both passion and intellect to his work, and he displayed a degree of dedication and engagement that could motivate others to new levels of achievement.”

Similar words were echoed by Curl: “Rick was a visionary, and his charisma and logic made those he worked with buy into the vision. Rick convinced us that we could be better, stronger, and take more chances if we just tried. I hope that we don’t forget that. Then his legacy to Rice will make a lasting transformative difference.”

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